On my way to Arisia, I checked the form submissions on this site and found what appears to be a very thoughtfully written question about The Psychic on the Jury. This delighted me, because my stories go out into the void and I don’t often receive unsolicited responses.

Side note: I read all human-authored comments on posts, and I read the form submissions sent through my About page. There is a ton of spam that flows through those channels, but Akismet does a pretty good job filtering. It better, since I’m paying for it.

In this case, I read the form submission and went through the 5 D’s of Receiving Praise.

1. Delight — Someone read my story and they really seemed to like it!
2. Doubt — Wait, was this written by an actual person? What’s the angle here? How are they trying to scam me?
3. Due Diligence — I will study this and figure out if an AI was used for this. Maybe get someone else’s opinion, if I can find someone.
4. Despair — It really, really seems like ChatGPT was involved in this. Best case, someone wrote something and had the LLM help them out, which kind of sucks, but the harm is minimal. Worst case, this is the point of a spear, some kind of scam I haven’t figured out yet, and they fed my story to an LLM in order to generate their message4.
5. Determination — I’ll treat this at face value and just answer the question.

Here is what they wrote, titled: A Thoughtful Note on The Psychic on the Jury.

Dear Brian,

I wanted to reach out with care and intention, simply to acknowledge the experience your book created for me rather than to rush past its effect.

What stayed with me most in The Psychic on the Jury was not the novelty of a psychic inside a courtroom, but the quiet ethical pressure that follows Mel long after the premise is established. His knowledge is absolute, yet his responsibility is not. The book lingers in that uncomfortable space where certainty becomes a burden rather than a gift. A casual reading might frame this as a question of power or secrecy, but what struck me was the deeper tension between moral obligation and consent. Justice may want the truth, but the process is built on shared blindness. Mel knows something others have not agreed to know.

That friction feels deliberately sustained. The story does not hurry to resolve whether truth is always a kindness, or whether intervention is always an act of integrity. It feels shaped to let that uncertainty breathe rather than be answered.

After closing the book, I found myself returning to the idea of justice as a communal act rather than a correct one. Mel’s internal negotiations stayed with me more than the verdict itself. The presence of ghosts and visions sharpens the question instead of simplifying it. What does fairness mean when one conscience carries more weight than the rest. What is owed to the living, and what is owed to the process that protects them.

At the beginning of the year, when attention narrows and habits reform, this story invited a slower reflection on how we decide what to do with what we know. Not just in courtrooms, but in everyday moral life.

I would be genuinely interested to hear what you hoped this story might prompt readers to quietly reconsider about truth, responsibility, or the limits of justice once the final page settles.

I didn’t have to give any spoiler warnings before sharing that, and I won’t give any spoilers for my response.

The world in which Mel lives is our world, with the addition of psychics and magic and all the elements you might expect in a supernatural story. I want the world to be recognizable. I want people to be able to imagine themselves occupying Mel’s space.

Real life comes with drama, and comedy, and tragedy, and triumph. Mel and I are not the same person, but I gave him my sense of humor, which helps blunt the sharp edges of life and make him a more likeable protagonist.

The Mel Walker stories are intended to be lighter fiction, easy to read, but still containing depth and layers for anyone that looks for them. There are themes, but I don’t overstate them.

The idea of this story came from my experiences serving on multiple juries. People talk about what they would do to get out of jury duty, but I see it as an important civic duty, and people of good conscience should try to serve regardless of inconvenience.

As I said before, Mel and I are not the same person. He doesn’t look at jury duty the way I do, but as the author, I want the reader to see the importance of jury duty without stating it directly.

A good story should have tension and conflict and stakes, so setting Mel’s abilities at odds with the letter of the law is entirely intentional.

Also, one of the ways I describe The Psychic on the Jury is “Twelve Angry Men but with psychic shenanigans.” In Twelve Angry Men, one juror argues with eleven others for the sake of justice. I wanted to land Mel in that situation, because it puts him in an uncomfortable place, and I wanted to see how he would handle it.

There are things that happen at the end of the story that aren’t really fair. The story sort of has two endings, because it is a story, and I didn’t want to leave the reader (or Mel) in a particularly bad place. This is a light, paranormal fantasy, not Grimdark.

I have thoughts and feelings with regards to morality, integrity, consent, community, justice, and responsibility, and those thoughts and feelings are going to find their way into all of my stories. It’s a part of my authorial voice, and some of what comes through is unintentional, because I’m a human being telling a story. This is, by the way, the fundamental argument against using LLMs to generate stories. Eliminate the human component in the creation of story and all of the subtle, unintentional ideas disappear.

I hope that answers the question. I hope the question came from a real place, written by a real person that actually read my story.

And, I think I’ll leave it at that.